Decision-Making
The Evolutionary Purpose of Cognitive Bias and Its Modern Day Pitfalls
The most illuminating way to understand any specific cognitive bias is to pair its original evolutionary purp…
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My Traits Lab Blog
Helpful articles about self-awareness, relationships, work style, emotional patterns, communication, and personal growth.
Decision-Making
How Biases Can Be Useful but Also Lead to Terrible Decisions
The dual nature of cognitive biases — genuinely useful in some situations, catastrophically harmful in others…
Decision-Making
A Comprehensive Guide to the Cognitive Biases Ruining Your Life
Cognitive biases do not ruin life in the abstract — they ruin it in specific domains, through specific distor…
Decision-Making
The Major Human Flaws: Cognitive Biases You Need to Watch Out For
Some cognitive biases are so frequent, so universal, and so consequential that they function as major human f…
Decision-Making
A List of the Worst Cognitive Biases That Destroy Decision-Making
Not all cognitive biases are equally destructive to decision-making. Some merely shade your judgments slightl…
Decision-Making
What is Confirmation Bias and How Does It Affect Your Decisions?
Confirmation bias is the single most consequential cognitive bias for decision-making, which makes a precise…
Decision-Making
The Danger of Only Seeking Information That Confirms Your Existing Beliefs
One specific behaviour driven by confirmation bias is uniquely dangerous and deserves focused attention: the…
Decision-Making
How to Overcome Confirmation Bias in Your Everyday Decision-Making
Understanding confirmation bias and even recognising its dangers does not overcome it — confirmation bias is…
Decision-Making
Why Confirmation Bias Leads to Echo Chambers and Polarization
Confirmation bias does not only distort individual decisions — it scales up, through social mechanisms, into…
Decision-Making
The Echo Chamber Effect: Ignoring News That Contradicts Your Beliefs
The echo chamber effect manifests most concretely and consequentially in one specific behaviour: how you cons…
Decision-Making
How Your Brain Uses Mental Shortcuts to Make Sense of the World
Every waking moment, your brain confronts a torrent of information far too vast to process completely — milli…
Decision-Making
The Science Behind Unconscious Mental Shortcuts and Cognitive Biases
Mental shortcuts and the cognitive biases they produce are not folk concepts but well-studied phenomena with…